Misanthrope's Corner - Food Network - Brief Article

National Review, March 25, 2002 by Florence King

Try this at home: Flip on the TV and check out the first words you hear before the picture comes up. They very likely will be "balsamic vinegar" or "extra-virgin olive oil." The country is obsessed with cooking. Not gourmet cooking -- the word is verboten now -- just cooking, as in what used to be called slaving over a hot stove.

The hottest stoves around are on the all-cooking-all-the-time Food Network, which has something and someone for every taste. Nostalgic for your sorority days? Watch lovably ditzy Sara Moulton, who takes phone calls while she cooks and gets so gabby that she forgets to give oven times and temperatures. If you're into life-or-death seriousness there's the Samurai of the Spatula, the Iron Chef, grimly presiding over Oriental cooking contests described like horse races ("Number Six is browning on the turn Number Four is starting to show signs of congealing").

Emeril Lagasse has succeeded in making cooking a manly art without wearing a chef's toque. Nobody wears a toque; they're as verboten as "gourmet." Mario Batali wears Bermuda shorts and orange clogs on Mario Eats Italy; Jamie Oliver (The Naked Chef) ties a tea towel around his waist to protect his ragged jeans; and an Indian girl whose name I forget wears very little of anything: Bib aprons hide cleavages, and she does breast presentations without a chicken.

Nobody is intimidating except the Frenchman who makes life-size swans out of spun sugar. We see them roaring off on their motorcycles to do their own shopping at the farmer's market, or, like the well-named Wolfgang Puck, attempting to drive a Viennese fiacre. The menus usually include travelogues; the Indian girl did a tour of Spain that ended with a ragout of bull testicles, and took us to a utensil-free public mess hall in Calcutta where customers sit on the floor with straw mats for plates while pairs of men lugging huge kettles race up and down the aisles dumping rice on the mats -- very much like my mother's presentations.

Adroit frenzy is the order of the day. Nobody except Martha Stewart measures anything, and they all use the homey yet proprietary locution favored by generations of women who really did spend the best years of their lives slaving over a hot stove: "my" instead of "the," as in, "Now I'm going to add my milk." Viewers who need reassurance can tune in to Food 911, on which the cook goes to someone's home to repair a disaster. And to make accident-prone viewers feel better about themselves, they all use wadded-up tea towels instead of potholders or oven mitts. It looks awkward and impromptu, and holds out the possibility that the towel will trail in the burner and start a fire.

I confess I've gotten hooked on them despite what I said in an earlier column about noisy cooks. They're still noisy, but they no longer get on my nerves. In fact, I could watch them all day long and occasionally do, which presents some real food-for-thought: If I swim with the tide, it must be some tide. What is behind our national cooking fad?

On the simplest level, we need look no further than the current state of the vast wasteland. Newscasters have gotten so repellent, talk shows so superficial, sitcoms so unfunny, dramas so mundane, movies so predictable, that the Food Network offers the best fare on TV in every sense of the word. I can honestly say that I owe much of my improved culinary skills to Fox News. If you have a choice between Shepard Smith and balsamic vinegar, why not opt for the original? If Greta Van Susteren's recently filleted face puts you off, why not look at a real monkfish instead?

On a more complicated level, it may be that America is oversupplied with college graduates who crave a sense of real usefulness. The conflict began generations ago when working-class fathers kept saying, "Don't be like me, earn your living with your brain, not your back." This incessant chant was seconded by she who spent the best years of her life slaving over a hot stove: "Don't be like him, make something of yourself!"

Later, as many parents became college graduates themselves, the words changed but the tune did not. We went on marching to it until we created a vast horde of bored and disillusioned victims of dumbed-down curricula and puffed-up jobs who now feel a need to "do something with my hands." They don't want to be factory workers or laborers, but cooking is the perfect compromise: manual work infused with polished elegance, and just enough French to keep you on the right side of the educational divide.

I know all about it. For 40 years I have earned my living with my brain; I never did anything else, and can't do anything else unless you count typing. The downside of American upward mobility is the frustration of the need to feel essential, to provide something that people can't live without -- the rueful knowledge that you've never made anything that is alleviated when you take up cooking.

Two other possible reasons for the cooking craze occur to me. Back in the '70s, Cosmopolitan ran a polemic by a male writer who said the women he knew actually tried to be bad cooks, inviting him to dinner so they could burn something to show him how liberated they were. It may be that women are feeling guilty over feminism, but that doesn't explain why so many men are Food Network junkies.